Free

Papa’s Best STL Viewer is the fastest STL viewer and needs little RAM. I wrote it specifically because MeshLab & Co are too slow. Compare the performance of various STL viewers loading this 116 MB STL:

Loading Time

Papa’s Best STL Viewer

0.5 s

fstl

1 s

IceSL

5 s

Slic3r

8.5 s

CUR3D

9 s

MeshLab

12.8 s

ADA 3D STL Viewer

14 s

STLView

16 s

3D-Tool

18 s

MeshBrowser

19 s

Cura

19 s

FreeCAD

21 s

Netfabb

22 s

MiniMagics

26 s

Open 3D Model Viewer

74 s

Meshmixer

77 s

Memory Demand

fstl

268 MB

ADA 3D STL Viewer

318 MB

Papa’s Best STL Viewer

336 MB

FreeCAD

502 MB

CUR3D

548 MB

MiniMagics

596 MB

Netfabb

710 MB

MeshBrowser

772 MB

3D-Tool

820 MB

IceSL

842 MB

Cura

937 MB

Slic3r

964 MB

MeshLab

1.27 GB

Meshmixer

1.28 GB

Open 3D Model Viewer

1.38 GB

STLView

1.70 GB

Benchmark Details

Core i7 860 with 8 GB of RAM; GeForce GTX 660; SSD; Windows 7 x64.

Programs were run thrice; the best numbers were recorded.

Loading time begins with launching the program with the file as parameter, and ends with the first UI response to user input.

Memory demand is the peak working set during loading time.

One second has been subtracted from MeshLab’s loading time for manually closing the remove duplicate vertices prompt.

MeshBrowser’s loading time begins with opening the file instead of launching the program.